PLAYING DOCTOR.(Television Program Review)

You wouldn't wish the terrific scene-stealers Oliver Platt and Blythe Danner as co-stars on the lead actor of a TV series, but Hank Azaria, as the main character, a successful middle-aged psychiatrist, in the new Showtime Sunday-night series "Huff," finds a way to keep his bearings in the actorly storm that those two whip up as his best friend and his mother. He does it in probably the only way possible, by being unassuming. Azaria has a beaky face, a receding hairline, and no attributes that add up to conventional star quality, and it is to his credit that he doesn't overcompensate by doing anything superfluous to try to make himself pop off the screen. You have the sense in "Huff" that he isn't acting but is "just being," and that's perfect for the role he's playing--someone whose job it is to listen, and not to be the center of attention--and for the plight that his character, Dr. Craig Huffstodt, or Huff to his friends, finds himself in at the beginning of the series. One day, after he has seen a couple of more or less garden-variety patients in his Los Angeles office (including one who can't figure out how to get her boyfriend to stop cracking his knuckles), Sam, a fifteen-year-old boy he has been treating who is distraught over the way his parents reacted to his telling them that he's gay, takes a gun from his knapsack, puts it in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. Huff is sure that the boy wasn't suicidal, but he can't be sure that it wasn't something he said that set Sam off or that he couldn't have got the gun away from him, and those questions contribute to his agony. Unfortunately, in a way, Huff's life doesn't come to a halt after Sam's suicide--he has to try to figure out how to go on while still going on. There is continual low-level skirmishing between his wife, Beth (Paget Brewster), and his mother, Izzy (Danner), who lives just thirty feet away, in a guesthouse. His friend Russell (Platt), a high-powered lawyer, is effective in helping Huff when he happens not to be drunk or stoned or picking up a hooker, but he's not exactly reliable; his legal work on Huff's behalf when Huff is sued by Sam's parents is scarily seat-of-the-pants. And there are still patients to see--one of whom, a "bipolar borderline psychotic" played by Lara Flynn Boyle, has "Fatal Attraction" tendencies. "God, Melody, are you going to boil my bunny?" Huff says to her when she materializes in a parking garage. At least Huff's sweet-faced fourteen-year-old son, Byrd (Anton Yelchin), is, for the most part, not a problem; in fact, he's freakishly gentle, thoughtful, and kind, like an angel in an elementary-school pageant. He seems not even to know how to sulk. Huff's father is not around, but he's a presence nonetheless, as a convicted committer of emotional crimes. At dinner the night that Sam killed himself, Izzy starts a sentence with "When your father was alive," and Huff cuts her off: "Dad isn't dead, Mother." Izzy replies, "Well, he is to me."

When you try to describe "Huff," it falls apart in your hands, because although there are story lines that progress, the show's strength ...